TechNet Wiki: Understanding the Service-concept in VMM 2012

Here’s a heads up on yet another cool article I found over on the TechNet Wiki today regarding System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. This is another one written by MVP Kristian Nese and it talks about the concept of services in SCVMM 2012:

For those of you that have tested and played around with VMM 2012, you may be aware of the new concept of services. VMM 2012 inherited the great possibility to create VM templates from VMM 2008 R2 and has taken this a bit further in 2012.

When you create a VM template in VMM 2012, you can define the following configuration:

Hardware Configuration (HW Profile)

OS Configuration (OS Profile)

Application Configuration (Application Profile)

SQL Server Configuration (SQL Profile)

It`s worth paying attention to that if you`re touching the Roles/Features in the OS profile, or/and the Application Profile/SQL Profile, as you will get a message when you deploy your VM that it needs to be deployed as a service since it contains additional configuration information (not only the HW profile with a reference to a vhd, networking, CPU`s, RAM, and the OS profile with admin password, domain information, time zone, and license key).

If you choose to continue, these options will be ignored.

So let`s move over to the Service Templates.

In SCVMM 2012 you can create a service that is a logical grouping of VMs that you can manage as a single entity. You can either create a single-tier service, or a multi-tier service….